


Who the Hell is Peggy?

by Merfilly



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-22
Updated: 2015-02-22
Packaged: 2018-03-14 13:10:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3411842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/pseuds/Merfilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain America: The Winter Soldier. After. Where the Winter Soldier was Peggy, not Bucky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who the Hell is Peggy?

She was just a headstrong woman, one who bit off more than she could handle. That was the common consensus when no rescue was mounted after Peggy Carter was abducted off an early SHIELD mission. None of Stark's pressure mattered, and like his search for Rogers, all his money couldn't buy peace of mind over how he had failed them. He left his notes about both searches buried in his personal files, refusing to share them with the intelligence agency. His son, always feeling left out by the obsession for people long since dead, so far as Tony could tell, never did pay much attention to the description of the 'ghost' supposedly involved in his father's fatal accident.

When SHIELD came falling down around them all, Tony started analyzing the fights that had been captured on camera, JARVIS having saved much of it from the media blanket Hydra agents had tried to put in place. His eyes narrowed as another piece of his father's past came back to haunt them all, but he thought he had answers for when Steve woke up.

//You'd damn well better wake up, Capsicle, or I won't forgive you this time.//

* * *

Steve poured over all of the notes from Howard Stark's attempts to find Peggy, the early hints that she had vanished into something behind enemy lines but not died. Once more, he felt rage for what America had become during his long sleep, that they had left one of their own to a fate worse than death. He was haunted by the site of her flat, blank look during their fights. How had they broken her into their Winter Soldier… no, he could not think on that. If he did, he'd wreck another gym.

Sam, asleep on the couch, snored loudly and then coughed, rolling over restlessly. Steve glanced that way, then toward the bedroom where Natasha had crashed after her latest inquisition. They both had said they would help him, but he wasn't so sure he could ask it of either one. He was just as haunted by the horror that he was so certain he'd seen dawning in Peggy's eyes in that last fight.

And someone had dragged him out of the water without staying to take their fifteen minutes of fame. It had to be her! So why had she run?

* * *

There was no memorial to explore, very little in the way of steps to retrace. The woman cut her hair and found clothes that masked her body shape, hid the damnable arm. Sunglasses and a cap to further obscure her feature were next; she'd been trained well to hide her identity rather than to embrace it. 

There were so many questions. The holes in her memory were larger than what she could recall.

But the face of a boy who desperately wanted to be a good man stayed with her through her attempts to find her past and know who she was. That man she had known had been willing to merely delay her, possibly at the cost of his life, rather than actively fight her. 

Steve Rogers held some of her answers, but could she face what they would spell out when her soul burned with a sense of betrayal deeper than her own identity could be?

* * *

Natasha could not get close enough to cover Steve's back as the horde of… creatures mobbed him. Sam was fighting his own battle in the sky against the ones with wings. She kept fighting, despite the numbers, trying to get to Cap, and then there was the glint of light on silver metal as something dropped into the middle of his fight from a nearby roof. Her eyes flew wide as she saw the assassin from her past tearing into the monstrosities that had spilled out of the laboratory, every line of the other woman blazing with ferocity. Natasha became too occupied to note details then, putting the creatures down as quickly as she could.

When she next looked over to the man she had thrown her lot in with, Captain America and the Winter Soldier were almost back to back, with a growing circle of unconscious or dead foes around them in heaps. Natasha had no idea where the woman had gone to ground so that none of them had been able to find her, but right now she could be happy for the reunion. Later would be enough time to question the woman and be paranoid.

* * *

They could all breathe now, the entire catastrophe of Mutant Lab Rats being done… but Steve just kept staring all around them. Sam landed near him, and Natasha moved in swiftly, putting her lips to his ear when he leaned in for her.

" _She_ was here, bugged out before he could speak to her."

"Damn," he answered softly, watching the man he had chosen to follow into hell or worse look like a lost kid all over again. He squared the pack on his shoulders, letting the weight of the wings inside it settle his nerves, and walked over to Steve. "Want me back in the sky?"

"She'd be expecting that," Steve said softly, knowing a search right now would be useless and already scouting the path he wanted to take to do just that.

Sam rested a hand on the blue-clad shoulder. "We're here, and if she came to help maybe she's just got to pick the right place and time."

Steve nodded, but his eyes were distant, and Sam slowly pulled his hand back to start scanning near and far. His friend was not going to be fully himself until they found this woman and started putting her back together.

* * *

"We are not going to go out there and try to trap her!" Steve exploded, looking at the assortment of men and women in his apartment, all of whom were 'staging an intervention' for his sake.

"That is not what we are offering to do at all!" Maria told him, firmly. "I'm just saying that in the weeks since the fight, you've seen her twice from a distance and had her actively aid you at least once—"

"—Twice. I found a casing that makes that one incident hers," Natasha interrupted.

"Twice then," Maria said, conceding the point. "We all are worried about you, worried about if she falls into a Hydra cell, or worse, and they break whatever grip she's found on coming back to her own choices!"

Steve studied her a long moment, then looked at Tony, at Clint, and started shaking his head again. Maria didn't let him open his mouth, though.

"Steve, she was your friend… but she was my damn hero," the woman said. "If it wasn't for some of her early work before she vanished… okay, was kidnapped, probably… SHIELD, the good damn part of it, never would have existed the way it did! So please, let us join your search!"

"I have Sam and Nat," he said weakly.

"More eyes mean quicker help for her," Clint offered in his quiet way. He tipped his head to the side, and Maria watched those eyes narrow and focus with all of Coulson's ability to read a person. She swallowed against the lump in her throat at how much he lived up to that teaching, and listened to whatever Clint observed. "If you are afraid we would try to hold her accountable, you need to look at your part of the team a little closer." And he just idly waved at Natasha, who gave him her tight little smile.

Maria wanted to face-palm, because that should have been obvious. She didn't though, just noting that Captain America was conceding defeat when he looked directly at Tony.

"No suit. And no Hulk."

"Scout's honor. He's fixing up a tracker based on isotopes in the flakes of the arm that were recovered off of your shield," Tony said.

"You were never a scout, but we'll make that stick anyway," Maria said, just to give Steve further assurance someone was riding herd on the flamboyant one of the group.

* * *

She analyzed the movement of each person she spotted coming out of Steve Rogers' apartment building. There… the redhead was leaving with the man she thought was the archer for that team. Was the flier still… no, he was walking out with the dark-haired woman and the billionaire. Stark.

The name, as she thought it, set off another cascade of memory flashes and a firm sense of betrayal. She forced it away, double-checking that everyone who had entered the apartment building was now gone. All she had to do was go down there, face her answers in that man. She had even made her own entrance, disabling security and locks on an outer window near his apartment.

"Rescue myself," she whispered, feeling something as determined as her sense of survival steeling her spine, and she moved toward that entrance.

* * *

Steve looked up the instant his door was touched, wondering which of them had forgotten something. Then his ears processed that it wasn't a key in the lock, just… something metal touching the door, half-moving across the grain of it. He moved as fast as he could, not even grabbing the shield, because he knew it had to be her, being preemptive against the threat of so many people in his space.

"Peggy," he said as the door gave him a view of her starting to turn away. She looked back at him, eyes shadowed.

"Rogers," she said, forcing distance through that name.

"Come inside," he offered, stepping back. 

She squared her shoulders, lips tightening in a pale mimic of the woman in Steve's memory, then entered his apartment. As he closed the door, wondering what would come next, the irreverent thought of having undone his friends' intervention was just exactly what Peggy could be expected to do. He just hoped it was the first of many things Peggy did at his side once again.

* * *

"What if she had chosen to run?" Maria asked Natasha, up on a nearby rooftop. "It was a risk."

"I knew, based on her past, that she would either leave the area of operations, thus giving me more room to work on calming Cap down," Natasha answered. "Or she would move in, to stake her claim further, at knowing so many of us were reaching out to him."

"Do you trust her?"

"I trust Rogers," was Natasha's rejoinder to that.

"Like Coulson trusted Barton?"

The women shared a gaze, and then Natasha nodded.

"Just like that."

Maria sighed. "Fine, I'm back to Stark then. If I can get his hands off Falcon." They both shared a laugh over the way Tony was itching to improve the wings. "You and Wilson…."

"We'll be here, for Cap… and for her, whichever way it goes."


End file.
